What the critics would be saying:
Pete E. Cue's exquisitely amateur renderings of Bach are throughout sublimely
uninspired, bracingly tedious and yet rarely inoffensive. Often accurate, the
tantalizing ineptitude and charming maladroitness are skillfully tempered by a
refined rigidity, making this performance a paragon of near-mediocrity, all the
more brilliant for its breathtaking triumph over the heretofore bulletproof
resiliency of the great Thuringian master's music. The scintillating spasticity,
the artfully tortured ornaments, the sweetly inexplicable vicissitudes of tempo are but a few of the magical facets of this engagingly dyslectic reading. The sound is delightfully tinny and brittle (resembling a period instrument...paleolithic or perhaps Flinstonic) richly enhanced by a pungently ill-tempered tuning that is especially poignant in the 'Well Tempered' Clavier selections (six of the Book 1 Preludes and Fugues, 42 to go: can we stand the wait?). And the jazz stylings are eloquent testimony to Cue's visionary and masterful command of an authentically 18th-century North German swing genre: a veritable Thuringian
52nd street!
Some words from the producer....
Pete E's playing is a revolution and a revelation: a rare insight into the limits of the
tolerable in piano performance. I speak, of course, of the lower limits. Or is that the
outer limits? His accomplishment is proof that 35 years of piano study need not hinder performance with irrelevantly polished playing. It was a richly enervating experience to work with him. He was relentlessly receptive, if immune to suggestions for improvement, leaving to me only the cleansing odium of post-production with its inevitable rawly nuanced and seamful editing.
From the interview in Popular Mechanics
PM: What does the 'E' stand for?
Pete E: I don't know. Do you?
J.S. Bach Preludes & Fugues (Bk.1) (selected)
J.S. Bach French Suite #2 in C minor
Serene Muses on Indiana (apologies Ch. Parker)
Hot from the archives:
Herr J.S. Bach:
French Suite #1 in D min. (almost....)
(or 10 thalers)
Und hier recently exhumed from the legendary 1999 sessions, this (mercifully?) long lost rendering by Maestro Cue of Bach's French Suite #1 in D minor-- presented here for all to witness anew the ever-joyously malign Cueish romping, characteristically absent any metronomic limitations, his piano 'tuned' in the always-piquant late-20th century Lauderdalian temperament:
A grand new release from the long and prudently neglected catalog of Pete E. Cue's defiantly deconstructed Bach: from the archives, ca. 2007, Cue's dyspeptically inspired (or rather perspired, or indeed expired?), inevitably 'sin'fully phony (mostly) 3-part Inventions
A Brian G. Bennett production for In Vain Records, © 2022
And now at long last, to his several fans' perhaps modest delight (or more disturbingly, their masochistic curiosity), Pete E. Cue can be seen performing (in his way) as the screen idol (i.e. 'idler') one might have feared him to be. Don your hazmat eye & earguards, and bravely (if foolishly) venture forth: